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Dedication

The book is dedicated to Mrs Benjamin, Gretchen, and appreciations are given
to G.R. Lal and R.E.L. Masters who each wrote an appendix, Richard Green who
wrote an appendix and the bibliography, Arthur Ceppos president of Julian Press (who also published Ron L Hubbard and John Lilly),
associates Leo Wollman and Wardell Pomeroy for advice and assistance, Richard
Levidow, attorney (who would later be the attorney for the Queens liberation Front), for advice on the legal chapter, Robert Laidlaw and Johannes
Burchard, psychiatrists for encouragement, Brooking Tatum for editing the book,
and to Reed Erickson for financial and moral support. John Money and Virginia Prince who are mentioned in the book are not mentioned in the appreciations.

Context

While there had been several previous books about transvestism, there had
been only two previous books specifically about transsexuality, both, as it happened, by
persons themselves transsexual: Self: A Study in Ethics and
Endocrinology, 1946, by Michael Dillon, and Over the Sex Border,
1963, by Georgina
Turtle. Neither of these are mentioned by Benjamin, although Turtle's book
is included without comment in Green's bibliography.

The word 'transsexual' first appeared in English in Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy & Clyde Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 1948, as a kind of homosexual considered as an intermediate sex. The next year, 1949, David Cauldwell wrote a paper for Sexology
about a girl who wanted to be a boy. He entitled the paper
‘Psychopathia transexualis’ (note the one S). This paper was not much
noticed. Harry Benjamin later commented: "Whether I had ever read that
article and the expression remained in my subconscious, frankly, I do
not know". It was Louise Lawrence who introduced Benjamin to Cauldwell’s writings. The word also turned up in Edward D Wood's 1953 film, Glen or Glenda, just before Benjamin used the word in public.

Ira Pauly had been sitting in
on Benjamin's Wednesday afternoon clinic with his transsexual patients, and in
1963 had read a paper before the American Psychiatric Association in St Louis:
"Female Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism", and in 1965 had published "Male
Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism. A Review of 100 Cases" in the
Archives of General Psychology (13:172-181). In Sweden Jan Wålinder was
working on his Transsexualism. A Study of Forty-Three Cases which would
be published in 1967. 1965 had seen the publication of Abby Sinclair's I Was
Male and Hedy Jo Star's My Unique Change. Neither of these are
mentioned by Benjamin, but they are in Green's bibliography. In 1965 John F Oliven
published Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, wherein he used the word
‘transgenderism’; he was omitted from Green’s bibliography.

In 1966, around the
time of publication of his book, Benjamin referred Phyllis
Avon Wilson to the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. She is taken to be
the Clinic's first patient to be operated on, and later that year she had become
a dancer in New York, where she was outed in a gossip column and the press
realized that there was a major story at Johns Hopkins. Shortly afterwards, the Universities of Minnesota, Stanford,
Northwestern and Washington at Seattle also
opened Gender Identity Clinics.

Earlier in 1966, the
British Medical Journal had published a leading
article on transsexuality that summarized the field from the medical point
of view. Christine Jorgensen's A Personal Autobiography would be
published in 1967, and be filmed three years later.

By 1966, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn had met each other, and Holly approached the Johns Hopkins clinic about TG surgery. Others who first went to the clinics that year were the one-year-old Bruce Reimer and Barbara Dayton. The National Academy drag pageant final 1967 would be won by Rachael Harlow, and the film version would become a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival. Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge would be published in 1968; the Stonewall riots would be a year after that.

Spelling

Benjamin is considered, in contradistinction to Cauldwell, as the major proponant of the 2-S spelling of 'transsexual'. He even writes ‘psychopathia
transsexualis’ when referring to Cauldwell’s term.

Readers of the PDF version may assume that there is a switch, in
Appendix D, to the 1-S spelling: 'transexual'. However this is a copying error.
It remains 2-s in the printed version.

Chapter 1:
The Symphony of the Sexes.

An
earlier draft of this
chapter was originally published as "Seven Kinds of Sex" in
Hugo
Gernsback's Sexology
Magazine in 1961.

On the first page, Benjamin writes: "'Gender' is the nonsexual
side of sex. As someone expressed it: Gender is located above, and
sex below the belt." p15/6
In the footnote on p65/42,
he repeats this and attributes it to Virginia
Prince.

Georgina
Somerset, in her 1963 book, had contentiously insisted that
chromosomes = sex. Benjamin is probably not replying to her in naming
this chapter. While admitting that chromosomal sex is fundamental,
he explains that 'sex' also has genetic, anatomical, legal, gonadal,
germinal, endrocrinal, psychological and social aspects. Chromosomes
are the one aspect that cannot be changed.

It
has of course become a cliché
of anti-trans writers to claim that one cannot change one’s
chromosomes and therefore one cannot one’s sex. I was disappointed
to find that Anne Vitale, who is otherwise trans positive, also makes
the same claim.

The Benjamin Scale - Typology

The author of the British Medical Journal article in early 1966 had
enumerated 3 kinds of transvestism: 1) as a masturbatory ritual associated with
erotic excitement 2) a symptom associated with other anomalies such as
homosexuality 3) a means of gratification without genital excitation or interest
in homosexual behaviour. He followed Kinsey in that a transvestite may or may
not be homosexual, and had rejected the common attitude in psychoanalysis that
(1) was the main form.

Benjamin reminds us, p32/13, that in previous publications, he had divided all
transvestites into three groups: 1) those who merely want to ‘dress’ and be
accepted as women. 2) those who waver, who want breast development but shy away
from surgery. 3) ‘fully developed’ transsexuals. Benjamin had arrived at this
typology after observing over 200 patients, of whom more than half he diagnosed as
transsexuals. He proceeds to discuss other doctors, p34/14, who divide by ‘sex
feel’: heterosexual transvestites, versus transsexuals who “considers his sexual
desire for a man to be heterosexual, that is, normal”. Benjamin does not
mention, as many have since, that this approach erases all gay and lesbian
sensibility. He does continue by commenting how trans patients are often bi, do
change sexuality over time, or are apparently heterosexual because they do not wish to be
seen as homosexual as well as tranvestic. However what he does so is assign Kinsey Scale vales to each of his six types.

Benjamin proposes what he calls his Sex Orientation Scale. It contains “six
different types of the transvestism-transsexualism syndrome as clinical
observations seem to reveal them. While there are six types, there are seven
categories listed on the scale, the first one describing the average, normal
person.”

While he had criticized other doctors who divide by ‘sex feel’, he applies a
Kinsey Scale number to each of his types. As Kinsey wrote it:

Persons of any Kinsey type may be Type I Pseudo Transvestite. However a Type
III True Transvestite is marked as Kinsey 0-2 (gynephilic) and thus gay
transvestites have been erased. Gays also cannot be Type II Fetishistic Transvestite
either (Kinsey 0-2), an assumption that was later built into the DSM-III-R 1987.
By then homosexuality was removed from the DSM, but transvestism was now added:
it was renamed 'Transvestic Fetishism'. As Prince
had advocated, and Benjamin implied in his scale, Transvestism was defined as
done by heterosexual males. Cross-dressing was not regarded as a transvestism
when done by women or gay men. However, presumably to Prince’s chagrin, the
psycho-analytic tradition that heterosexual transvestism was a fetish was
accepted.

At the other end of the scale, Type V True Transsexual Moderate Intensity is
Kinsey 4-6 and Type VI True Transsexual High Intensity is Kinsey 6 only. Thereby
Charlotte
Goiar, Lili
Elevenes (Elbe), Betty
Cowell, Jan
Morris, Renée Richards cannot be True Transsexuals on this scale, only those
who are gay/androphilic. This is the basis of the claim by Ray Blanchard
to have recognized a second transsexual type, the ‘autogynephile’, although most
who are Kinsey 1-3 pre-op reject the term.

What about Type IV Nonsurgical Transsexual? The older Virginia Prince would
presumably fit in here, but never agreed with the label. Louise Lawrence and
Susanne Valenti also fit. It is marked Kinsey 1-4. Prince and her followers
attempted to appropriate the term ‘transgenderist’ for this category, but never made the term their own. However
should it not also contain non-surgical persons such as Holly Woodlawn, International
Chrysis, Jayne
County, Minette
or Carla Antonelli who were presumably Kinsey 5-6? Does Benjamin assume that all
such androphilic trans women would eventually opt for surgery.

Benjamin does not build early or late transition into his schema. Type V or
Type VI may transition at 16 or 61. Early transition is not a requirement. Of
course a Type VI High Intensity person would logically want to transition early,
but in 1966 there were lots of trans women who had been desperately wanting
transition for 30 or 40 years but the doctors, the clinics had not been
available.

Note that Benjamin uses ‘Trapped in a male body’ to describe Type V Moderate
Intensity. For Type VI High Intensity he uses ‘Total Psycho-Sexual Inversion’.
This is not a distinction that later writers paid any attention to.

A footnote, p40/18, presents two alternate typologies. “After having devised
the first S.O.S. chart, it was shown to two of the most earnest students of the
transvestitic problem, both transvestites themselves, and they formulated charts
of their own. In one, seven types were likewise recognized and recorded as
follows”.

5 comments:

As a type IV myself I still find Benjamin's work (warts and all) to be the best and most honest examination of transvestism and transsexualism. During his time we lacked the language we have today and the exposure that trans people get today would have no doubt given Benjamin some pleasure as he respected his patients. A far cry from the toxic Blanchard et al.

Were he alive today he would probably have redrafted much of his great book but I still think it holds up very well as a compassionate analysis from someone who wanted to help his patients.

As I will be bringing out, there is tension between the scale, which is what most people read, and what Benjamin actually says in the text. When you say that you are a Type IV, do you mean fulltime like Louise Lawrence or Holly Woodlawn, or do mean like Benjamin's one and only example Irene on p81/37 who is more what we would call a cross dreamer?

Incidentally the roots of HBS/Blanchardism are found in Benjamin's book, as I will be showing in Part III.

I grant that based on Benjamin's wording, that you and Irene may claim to be Type IV, but if so where are the full-time non-ops? Type V request surgery by definition. Are full-time non-ops erased along with gay transvestites and gynephilic Type VIs?

I think that these categories always have a lot of grey and lots of latitude in them. The differences between types 3 and 4 could blur as could between the others. Unfortunately its not an exact science. But when I read Benjamin I found a better fit for me within that category. My decision to live part time has much to do with my current life situation.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.